The invention relates to financial analysis systems and, more particularly, to financial analysis systems which receive data in real time from external sources and which manipulate and display that data in a variety of forms. As used herein, the term “real time” should be understood to include contemporaneous data, as well as data which may in fact be delayed for relatively brief intervals, e.g., on the order of twenty minutes or so. The invention is particularly applicable to the receipt, processing and display in real time of market information with respect to a portfolio of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. For ease of explanation, the invention will be described with specific reference to stocks, but should be understood as being applicable to financial instruments in general.
An example of a financial analysis system that has found wide application by professional traders for portfolio and risk tracking analysis is the EXP™ Real-Time Analytics package that has been developed by the assignee of the present invention. This package offers sophisticated capabilities for applying econometric and financial analysis to various types of monetary instruments, including stocks, bonds, and currencies, among others. For example, parameter estimation, forecasting, classification, and hypothesis testing can readily be performed by the user with the aid of predefined functions incorporated into the system. Unique user-defined functions can readily be added by the user by means of the built-in programming language. A more detailed description of the preexisting EXPO™ system is set forth more fully in the manual of appendix A of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/567,449, entitled “Getting Started With Expo” which is incorporated herein by reference.
An important feature of financial analysis systems is the user interface. Menu selection of functions plays an important role in most such systems. This form of selection is nearly universal, but slows access to data or presentations when the user desires to switch data sources or views. Some systems allow limited rapid switching between selected elements by clicking a mouse, but none is known which employs this approach with entire portfolios of instruments. For example, in the EXPO™ system, a user that desires to obtain a Charts View of a particular stock can do so by entering the name or symbol of the stock in a window or by dragging the symbol for the stock onto an available chart window. When Charts Views of several stocks are desired, this process becomes time-consuming, especially when the user may wish to switch back and forth between numeric and Charts Views.